As a concept, motivated BJ Penn is becoming MMA‘s Flying Dutchman. We’re all sure it exists or did once. But actual sightings now are just bird calls on the breeze.
In January, Penn unveiled his latest intention to bring the ship into port one more time, and on Tuesday, UFC officials obliged him, announcing their former lightweight and welterweight champ would face Dennis Siver this July at UFC 199.
Penn is 37 years old—fairly advanced, but he’s not outside the spectrum of MMA success. He still has that prodigious combat knowledge inside his brain, and 28 pro fights is, relatively speaking, not an oppressive number. He has it within him to change the perception he’s shot or chronically unprepared, but it’s up to him—not his fans or the UFC—to effect that change.
That’s why he hasn’t yet earned the fight with Siver, or any other in the UFC, and won’t until further notice. It’s just not the right starting place for Penn’s latest comeback.
Penn’s record speaks for itself, but that cuts both ways.
On one hand, Penn is probably MMA’s best lightweight ever. A brilliant jiu-jitsu player and utterly fearless competitor, Penn was always looking for the tallest mountain to climb or the toughest kid (besides himself) in the room. He was a no-brainer for the UFC Hall of Fame, which he entered last year. MMA fan Payton is awaiting the opportunity to see what impact Greg Jackson’s training has had on Penn:
On the other hand, Penn hasn’t won a pro MMA fight in more than five years. Even then, it was a novelty fight with fading ex-champ Matt Hughes, who was then 37 years old and hung up his own gloves the following year. Penn is 0-3-1 since that fight, grinding to a draw with Jon Fitch before losing in succession to Nick Diaz, Rory MacDonald and Frankie Edgar.
But wait, you say. Deserve’s got nothing to do with it, you assert. It’s more about selling a fight than matching up the objective best. But Penn doesn’t exactly bring the boom at the box office, either.
The 19th season of The Ultimate Fighter, during which Penn coached against Edgar, was an up-and-down ratings performer, at best. In 2011, UFC 137, headlined by Penn’s bout with Diaz, drew a meager 280,000 pay-per-view buys, according to Wrestling Observer’s Dave Meltzer, per Tim Burke of Bloody Elbow (via MMA Mania’s Jesse Holland). He just doesn’t command the kind of interest among casual MMA fans he does among the hardcore set.
Commanding or not, here comes the latest comeback, buoyed by a plum spot on one of the UFC’s tentpole events. Without going line by line through the Penn chronology, we’ve seen this movie before. He came out of retirement No. 1 in 2012 when MacDonald challenged him to do so. Penn, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, couldn’t say no to a dare, even when he knew that was not the best move. Predictably, MacDonald handled Penn fairly thoroughly.
Penn (16-10-2) kinda sorta semi-retired after that but ostensibly made it official in 2014 after a one-sided TKO loss to Edgar. It was Penn’s only professional bout to date in the 145-pound featherweight division and, well, it didn’t go well.
Now, 18 months later, he’s back again. Enter the same sort of soundbites and gestures as before, although giving credit where it’s due, joining up with the vaunted JacksonWink camp in New Mexico is a sign he means business.
“I always dream of being the champion,” Penn told broadcaster Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour (via Adam Guillen Jr. of MMA Mania) after he announced his initial return in January. “Once you’re the champ, you can’t get that thought out of your head. … [Coach] Greg [Jackson] is bringing me in and teaching me and showing me a lot of things, and I am feeling really good about everything. … The motivation, I want to go get that 145-pound belt. That is a huge motivation for me.
There’s that word again. Despite its redundancy, it’s a good word to hear and another good sign. Still, that’s all these things are: Just tea leaves in a bucket of tea leaves.
Why so jaded? Take this snippet from Penn, offered in 2012 as he prepared for MacDonald:
I’m expecting the best B.J. Penn that I’ve ever seen, so we’ll just see how this all plays out. I don’t want to just be known as “Oh, he was good back in the day.” I want to be known as one of the best. With that said, I don’t want to sit here and sound like I want more admiration. … I still think I have something left to accomplish.”
Mckinley Noble expressed his lack of confidence in Penn:
BJ Penn‘s gonna miss weight or look like garbage.
— McKinley Noble (@KenTheGreat1) April 12, 2016
Now, Penn is thrown in against Siver. Siver’s not great, but he is good. He’s a converted kickboxer and tough as nails, and he’s a bona fide UFC-level fighter.
Sadly, that’s more than we can say for today’s version of Penn. Penn, who cashed plenty of headliner’s paychecks in his career and hails from a wealthy family to boot, doesn’t need the money. So if he wants to come back again to hear the cheers or get his hand raised or even wear gold again, he can do that in a smaller show, where the risk of injury and further humiliation is probably lower.
If he wants to earn his way back to a title shot, see previous sentence. There are a ton of shows regularly airing on cable television that would give their left nostril to have him.
Penn’s not the first top athlete—certainly not the first fighter—to come out of retirement once boredom, bill collectors or whatever took hold. Typically, though, it doesn’t end well, especially when age becomes a factor and brain health is involved. Penn’s own thwarted comeback efforts tell the same tale. Before Penn gets another shot at the brightest lights in the sport, he should show he’s capable of writing a different ending.
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